Pitchers get a grip at Coors

DENVER - The Colorado Rockies reached the World Series thanks to slugger Matt Holliday's big bat, shortstop Troy Tulowitzki's great glove and because Tony Cowell's feet hurt on a duck hunt six years ago.

After the Rockies were allowed to use a humidor, the average runs per game dropped by nearly three runs and ranked 10th in homers this season.

An employee in the team's engineering department, Cowell noticed his leather boots had dried up and shrunk over the summer. He wondered whether cowhide baseballs were doing the same thing in Denver's thin, bone-dry air.

Cavernous Coors Field was a place where home runs were launched like every day was an All-Star Home Run Derby, where pitchers feigned injuries or complained that it felt like they were throwing billiard balls.

Tests, some simple - such as dropping baseballs on concrete and noticing the dry ones bounced higher - and some scientific, proved Cowell's theory correct and the humidor was introduced in 2002.

Baseball at a mile high hasn't been the same since.

It will make its World Series debut tonight in Game 3 when Josh Fogg and the Rockies try to bounce back against Boston's Daisuke Matsuzaka after the Red Sox won the first two games at Fenway Park.

"What we found was the balls were getting smaller and traveling farther," Colorado manager Clint Hurdle said. "For a long time, it was unbeknownst to us. We would go, 'Oooh! and 'Ahh!' and watch them go. And everybody that came to the plate was homer ready."

The Rawlings balls had fallen below Major League Baseball's regulations, which require them to be between 5 and 5 ounces with a circumference of 9 to 9 inches. The Rockies sold MLB on the idea of a climate-controlled vault to store the baseballs in their boxes on metal racks.

The steel-walled room behind the Rockies clubhouse is always 70 degrees with 50 percent humidity. Baseballs are stored on large metal racks and rotated with each shipment, about four times a year.

Before games, 10 to 12 dozens of baseballs are rubbed with mud and returned to the humidor until game time.

It holds about 400 dozen baseballs and a new shipment of 142 came in this month for the World Series.